Telephone and video conferencing technology has steadily improved and become an important resource for corporate communications as well as individual communications. The benefits of having direct user interaction whether audio or audio/video conferencing are well established, in contrast with less personal methods such as email. Moreover, users can participate in the conference using a variety of modalities, such as landline telephones, IP phones, and wireless phones, via computer audio systems, as well as be grouped into a conference room while others call in.
A problem that exists in multiuser conferences is acoustic echo caused by the reappearance of originally transmitted signals by some small delay. One solution for the echo problem is to mute the microphone or speakers of conference room devices. However, a different problem then becomes to remember if a device is muted or unmuted. Many users may not realize this and begin talking to a dead microphone, for example, which is a bad experience and counterproductive to the session. A similar problem is when the speaker is muted. For example, if a participant joins a conference call and the speaker in the near-end device has been turned off, the joined participant will not hear anything. Moreover, when speaking to find out who is there, this may be an interruption to an in-process dialog.